272 research outputs found

    The Party's Over? The Angry Brigade, the Counterculture, and the British New Left, 1967-1972

    Get PDF
    This article analyses the emergence of politically motivated acts of left-wing terrorism in Britain between 1967 and 1972. Through the case of the ‘Angry Brigade’, an ill-defined grouping which claimed responsibility for a number of attacks against property between 1970 and 1971, it analyses how protest and political violence emerged from discourses and events in the British New Left, the anti-war protest movements, the counterculture, and the underground press. Against common interpretations of ’68 as a watershed of naïve hopes that waned into inaction, this article identifies a consistency of political activity that developed beyond traditional party and class politics towards a more internationally aware and diverse network of struggles for civil equality. Among the shared political and cultural commitments of the counterculture, campaigns around squatting, women's liberation, or the necessity of ‘armed propaganda’ each became possible and at times overlapped. It analyses the group's development, actions, communications, as well as surrounding media discourses, subsequent police investigation, and the criminal trials of ten individuals for their involvement in the Angry Brigade. The article reappraises their overlooked historical significance among the wider countercultural militancy and discourses of political violence of the late 1960s to early 1970s

    Minard revisited: exploring augmented reality in information design

    Get PDF
    This study intends to test and confirm the interest and viability of incorporating augmented reality (AR) technologies in cultural mediation driven by information design, focusing on narrative representation. It is specifically intended to explore semantic relations between reality and virtuality in augmented narratives, ie. expanded narratives through the multimodality enhanced by the use of interactive processes based in augmented reality systems. Departing from Charles Minard’s Figurative Map (1869), three experiments were conducted, in order to reinterpret the program embodied in that artefact, testing several hypotheses in which, through augmented reality, the combination of different modes and media configures different semantic relations between real and virtual. The action-reflection approach undertaken with Figurative Map experiments enabled us to observe and openly systematize different augmented reality functions regarding the physical instance, which can potentially expand traditional forms of information design. Although they are not entirely extrapolatable, the proposal of virtual functions regarding reality were repurposed and adapted from the illustration field, specifically from the semantic relation between text and image. It is acknowledged that this is an open model to be reconsidered and reformulated through several action-reflection iterations and fostered through the narrative study.publishe

    An assertion language for constraint logic programs

    Full text link
    In an advanced program development environment, such as that discussed in the introduction of this book, several tools may coexist which handle both the program and information on the program in different ways. Also, these tools may interact among themselves and with the user. Thus, the different tools and the user need some way to communicate. It is our design principie that such communication be performed in terms of assertions. Assertions are syntactic objects which allow expressing properties of programs. Several assertion languages have been used in the past in different contexts, mainly related to program debugging. In this chapter we propose a general language of assertions which is used in different tools for validation and debugging of constraint logic programs in the context of the DiSCiPl project. The assertion language proposed is parametric w.r.t. the particular constraint domain and properties of interest being used in each different tool. The language proposed is quite general in that it poses few restrictions on the kind of properties which may be expressed. We believe the assertion language we propose is of practical relevance and appropriate for the different uses required in the tools considered

    Re-evaluation of the diagnosis of porphyria cutanea tarda in Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort

    Get PDF
    OBJECTIVES: Two biographies of Admiral Francis Beaufort (1774-1857) have stated that, aged 20-25 years, he suffered from porphyria cutanea tarda (PCT) that was 'cured' following severe blood loss during a naval skirmish. We have examined the evidence concerning the nature of his skin disease.  DESIGN: Primary records, most notably Beaufort's correspondence with his family, his journals and his father's diaries were sought out and analysed.  SETTING: This case report is discussed in the context of 18th-century naval medicine and concepts and treatment of skin disease.  RESULTS: The description of his lesions, their age of onset, their progression and response to treatment, particularly topical tar and associated features are quite inconsistent with a diagnosis of PCT. His mother, Mary Waller Beaufort (1739-1821), consulted Dr Robert Darwin in 1803 about a painful skin disease affecting her legs. Detailed description of the lesions and a contemporary diagnosis are not available but possible diagnoses include chronic psoriasis and stasis eczema.  CONCLUSIONS: A more tenable diagnosis is that Francis Beaufort had chronic plaque psoriasis remitted by bed rest and convalescence in the sunny Mediterranean climate with cessation of alcohol consumption and improved nutrition as well as topical and oral medications

    ObStruct: A method to objectively analyse factors driving population structure using Bayesian ancestry profiles

    Get PDF
    Bayesian inference methods are extensively used to detect the presence of population structure given genetic data. The primary output of software implementing these methods are ancestry profiles of sampled individuals. While these profiles robustly partition the data into subgroups, currently there is no objective method to determine whether the fixed factor of interest (e.g. geographic origin) correlates with inferred subgroups or not, and if so, which populations are driving this correlation. We present ObStruct, a novel tool to objectively analyse the nature of structure revealed in Bayesian ancestry profiles using established statistical methods. ObStruct evaluates the extent of structural similarity between sampled and inferred populations, tests the significance of population differentiation, provides information on the contribution of sampled and inferred populations to the observed structure and crucially determines whether the predetermined factor of interest correlates with inferred population structure. Analyses of simulated and experimental data highlight ObStruct's ability to objectively assess the nature of structure in populations. We show the method is capable of capturing an increase in the level of structure with increasing time since divergence between simulated populations. Further, we applied the method to a highly structured dataset of 1,484 humans from seven continents and a less structured dataset of 179 Saccharomyces cerevisiae from three regions in New Zealand. Our results show that ObStruct provides an objective metric to classify the degree, drivers and significance of inferred structure, as well as providing novel insights into the relationships between sampled populations, and adds a final step to the pipeline for population structure analyses. © 2014 Gayevskiy et al

    Recall termination in free recall

    Get PDF
    Although much is known about the dynamics of memory search in the free recall task, relatively little is known about the factors related to recall termination. Reanalyzing individual trial data from 14 prior studies (1,079 participants in 28,015 trials) and defining termination as occurring when a final response is followed by a long nonresponse interval, we observed that termination probability increased throughout the recall period and that retrieval was more likely to terminate following an error than following a correct response. Among errors, termination probability was higher following prior-list intrusions and repetitions than following extralist intrusions. To verify that this pattern of results can be seen in a single study, we report a new experiment in which 80 participants contributed recall data from a total of 9,122 trials. This experiment replicated the pattern observed in the aggregate analysis of the prior studies

    The Feeling of Numbers: emotions in everyday engagements with data and their visualisation

    Get PDF
    This paper highlights the role that emotions play in engagements with data and their visualisation. To date, the relationship between data and emotions has rarely been noted, in part because data studies have not attended to everyday engagements with data. We draw on an empirical study to show a wide range of emotional engagements with diverse aspects of data and their visualisation, and so demonstrate the importance of emotions as vital components of making sense of data. We nuance the argument that regimes of datafication, in which numbers, metrics and statistics dominate, are characterised by a renewed faith in objectivity and rationality, arguing that in datafied times, it is not only numbers but also the feeling of numbers that is important. We build on the sociology of a) emotions and b) the everyday to do this, and in so doing, we contribute to the development of a sociology of data

    Phenotypic and Genetic Divergence among Poison Frog Populations in a Mimetic Radiation

    Get PDF
    The evolution of Müllerian mimicry is, paradoxically, associated with high levels of diversity in color and pattern. In a mimetic radiation, different populations of a species evolve to resemble different models, which can lead to speciation. Yet there are circumstances under which initial selection for divergence under mimicry may be reversed. Here we provide evidence for the evolution of extensive phenotypic divergence in a mimetic radiation in Ranitomeya imitator, the mimic poison frog, in Peru. Analyses of color hue (spectral reflectance) and pattern reveal substantial divergence between morphs. However, we also report that there is a “transition-zone� with mixed phenotypes. Analyses of genetic structure using microsatellite variation reveals some differentiation between populations, but this does not strictly correspond to color pattern divergence. Analyses of gene flow between populations suggest that, while historical levels of gene flow were low, recent levels are high in some cases, including substantial gene flow between some color pattern morphs. We discuss possible explanations for these observations

    The Sleeping Brain's Influence on Verbal Memory: Boosting Resistance to Interference

    Get PDF
    Memories evolve. After learning something new, the brain initiates a complex set of post-learning processing that facilitates recall (i.e., consolidation). Evidence points to sleep as one of the determinants of that change. But whenever a behavioral study of episodic memory shows a benefit of sleep, critics assert that sleep only leads to a temporary shelter from the damaging effects of interference that would otherwise accrue during wakefulness. To evaluate the potentially active role of sleep for verbal memory, we compared memory recall after sleep, with and without interference before testing. We demonstrated that recall performance for verbal memory was greater after sleep than after wakefulness. And when using interference testing, that difference was even more pronounced. By introducing interference after sleep, this study confirms an experimental paradigm that demonstrates the active role of sleep in consolidating memory, and unmasks the large magnitude of that benefit
    • …
    corecore